Hi, It's Me Again by Asher Perlman

I bemoan the sorry state of single-panel cartoons a lot here - because I like them, and because they used to be a massive tide rolling across popular culture, so there were many more of the things I liked, albeit mostly before I was born - so it's nice to be able to balance that out now and then.

Asher Perlman's first book of cartoons, covering a decade or so of toil and strife, was published last fall: Well, This Is Me. It was a best-seller, says the publisher, and I believe them. The reason I believe them is because they backed it up: they published what looks very much like a sequel to the first book just about exactly a year later, which is the time-honored model for a publisher that has found a good thing and wants it to continue as long as they possibly can.

The 2025 Asher Perlman collection is Hi, It's Me Again, featuring the same character (and a variation on the joke) from the cover of the first book. Again, "hey, this is a sequel!" is a reaction you aim for when the first thing did well, so I am happy for Perlman and for comics-in-book-form in general.

Like the first book, it has three new short page-formatted comic sections to organize it (Introduction, Interlude, Epilogue), all with the "real" Perlman taking to another character about his work, in the usual half self-deprecating, half self-aggrandizing manner appropriate for comedy.

In between are two big sections, transparently called Part One and Part Two, each with eighty or ninety single-panel cartoons. The whole book is just about two hundred pages long, so it has almost that many pages of Perlman art and gags.

The only remaining major regular outlet for single-panel cartoons is The New Yorker, and Perlman does appear regularly there. According to the copyright page, nine of the cartoons here first appeared in that magazine - it's possible that some of the others appeared elsewhere, but likely the vast majority of them are new to this book. (At least as far as the general public goes; my guess is that they were part of Perlman's weekly "batches" over the past who-knows-how-long, though potentially reworked or finished for this book.)

As always, it's difficult to say anything specific about a pile of nearly two hundred individual cartoons. Perlman has a fine modern cartoon style, with confident lines mostly of a single weight and various tones overlaid for texture and depth, and his ideas and punch lines are funny. (At least, I think so, and I'm the one reading the book.) A lot of people liked the first book; if you were one of them, this second book is more of the same stuff you already liked.

If you weren't one of them, well, a lot of people liked the first book, so the odds you'll like this one are solid - give it a try, won't you? Help keep single-panel cartoons alive; it's your civic duty.